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Andrew Keen during a q&a for On The Record. Eric Luse/The Chronicle Names (cq) from source MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG /

keenandersonqa_049_el.jpg
Andrew Keen during a q&a for On The Record. Eric Luse/The Chronicle Names (cq) from source MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG /

Photo: Eric Luse

Debate 2.0 / Weighing the merits of the new Webocracy

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The Internet has become a wildly optimistic and democratic medium, rife with community-based sites that draw millions of fans and disrupt scores of industries.

Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook encourage community, friendship and sharing. News aggregators like Digg.com let readers choose the best stories of the day. Citizen journalists and bloggers pursue their own stories and disseminate them for free on the Internet, bypassing the mainstream media altogether.

Dubbed Web 2.0, among other things, this new Internet has captured the attention of Wall Street and Main Street alike, witnessed by the billions spent on companies such as MySpace and by the millions of users who visit those sites religiously. Just last week, the video sharing site YouTube was snapped up by Google for $1.65 billion, sparking talk of a new bubble.

How is this new environment affecting us? What is it doing to the flow of information? And the creation of art? How is it changing our culture? The Chronicle invited two of the Internet's sharpest thinkers to debate these questions. The following was edited for clarity and length.

Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired magazine and author of "The Long Tail," an economic analysis of how technology is changing our world for the better. Andrew Keen, a Web entrepreneur and author of the book "The Cult of the Amateur," to be published in May, is not convinced that technology is bettering us or our society. He believes the new, freewheeling Internet is diluting our culture by celebrating mediocrity.

Join us for the conversation.

Q: What's being called Web 2.0 essentially champions the ideas of community and sharing and openness. It's an environment that champions the values of the crowd over the individual. Democracy over autocracy. How is this latest wave of technology impacting our culture?

Andrew Keen: I don't think technology is doing a great deal for culture. Much of the euphoria and optimism about this latest wave of technology is suggesting that we, through these new technologies, are creating better culture. Better movies and music, for instance.

I am not convinced of that. Perhaps I am a reactionary here, defending an anachronistic culture, but my sense is that this latest, democratized culture, this user-generated content, is actually undermining many of our most valuable institutions, including movie studios, music labels, newspapers and publishing. I'm not convinced that technology is actually doing a great deal for the world at the moment.

Q: Chris, you have a bit more optimistic view on the role technology can play in the world and our economy, as evidenced by your book, "The Long Tail." Do you care to counter what Andrew was just saying?

Chris Anderson: Technology is nothing other than an enabler of individual power. The tools once reserved for professionals are now in the hands of everybody. A lot of people just speak to each other directly without going through intermediaries and having messages diluted or distorted.

I broadly believe in democratic principles. I broadly believe in market principles. I think that the three most powerful forces of our time are evolution, democracy and capitalism, all three of which are very much individualistic, sort of enlightened self-interest and individual agents working autonomously.

History suggests that they are the least bad of the available models. They tend to reach more optimal, but not perfect, solutions. So, if you believe in democracy and if you believe in markets, then you believe in technologies that help them work more efficiently. That's very much what we are seeing today.

Q: That idea of democracy and open markets speaks to the wisdom of crowds -- the idea that mass philosophy or mass culture is somehow a greater good. The Web 2.0 movement is based on the idea that group-think is an improvement over individual thought. Andrew, is the crowd smarter than the individual?

Keen: Before I did all this Silicon Valley stuff, I used to teach political philosophy and I used to teach a class about the beginning of American history, the Federalist Papers.

Many of the arguments that came about then are playing themselves out all over again. I think perhaps the more pertinent issue is one of direct democracy versus representative democracy. What I think you are seeing in this "flattened" world that (New York Times columnist) Tom Friedman writes about, along with so many other pro-technology writers, is the idealization of direct democracy.

I still think that the wisdom that I value -- the scarcity, to put it in economic terms -- is not in the crowd, but in people with talent and experience, whether they exist in political life, in economic life or cultural life.

Rather than fetishizing this idealized crowd -- it seems tremendously abstract -- one can pick up so many examples from history where the crowd has not behaved in a very wise or gentlemanly way. I would rather focus on the value of expertise and the wisdom of people who are trained.

Anderson: I think the fantastic thing about democracy and the open systems we are talking about today is that they define talent and expertise much more efficiently than the old models did.

Let's take cultural and political examples. The old model was that if you wanted to be a filmmaker, you had to go to the Hollywood studios. If you wanted to be a musician and get heard, you would go through the label system. If you wanted to be a published author, you needed to get signed by a publisher.

The new model is, "Just go and do it." Everyone can get out there directly without going through these gatekeepers, and most of what is created is junk, but some of it isn't.

A lot of people are doing things that maybe wouldn't have passed the threshold or the test of admittance. For instance, MySpace or YouTube are turning out to be tremendously popular, but they are not conventional.

I think that talent, expertise and wisdom is more broadly distributed than it was in our old models. That, I think, is a form of crowd behavior, but not the whole crowd acting together. But that crowd is very good at spotting merit and elevating it so that it can get the audience it deserves.

Q: In a way, Chris, the wisdom of crowds leads directly into your "long tail" economic theory. Can you give us a brief synopsis of that theory?

Anderson: The long tail is life after the blockbuster. Or more to the point, it is life after the monopoly of the blockbuster.

Our economy is shifting from mass markets to millions of niche markets. (Editor's note: The term "long tail" specifically refers to the endless x-axis of a classic sales/demand curve).

In the old model, markets have limited shelf space. You only have room to stock the things that are most popular. Now we have markets that have infinite shelf space that don't have to discriminate between the conventionally good or the things that predictably sell well. We can offer everything and then measure what's actually popular. As a result, you can access the whole curve, and what you find is that the long tail, or niche item, is a big and growing market.

Q: Andrew, does the new system do a better job at identifying talent and content?

Keen: I don't think that the old system did a bad job. One of the speeches that really changed my position was actually one made by (former Wired editor and author) Kevin Kelly a couple of years ago when he said that we have a moral obligation to develop technology in order to create the next generation of Hitchcocks, Mozarts and Van Goghs. That's a very interesting position. I don't think it's true.

The classic example would be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. They got through in the old system. That's obvious. Would they get through today if they were just another band on YouTube or MySpace? Would they have the marketing sophistication to actually make it in this world?

Q: You're saying people get lost in the shuffle on the long tail?

Keen: I'm saying that experts in the music business and experts in the movie business know what they're doing. I am a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock. The guy came here in the early part of the 20th century and had already established himself as a big player in a small pond in the U.K. He came to Hollywood because of (producer David O.) Selznick, who picked him out as a genius. You need the Selznicks of the world. You need the Brian Epsteins (who managed the Beatles). Where is Epstein or Selznick in the long tail?

Anderson: Where do I start? We have plenty of bands who are now becoming popular -- for instance the Arctic Monkeys -- without going through the traditional label system, who are being identified because they're good. Many of them weren't actually terribly sophisticated about online marketing.

By the way, it doesn't take much to become good at online marketing. But, they were talented. Might they have been discovered by an (artist and repertoire) guy, some talent scout? Possibly. Did they need to be discovered by an A&R guy? No.

Increasingly, we have more and more of that. What I suggest is the talent guys are fantastic. The A&R guys are great. There is more talent out there than any one of them can find. I think the problem is that we just didn't know what we weren't finding before. We knew what we were finding and that was good and those guys will continue to do their work.

I believe that there was more talent out there than Hollywood discovered.

By the way, I should stop and point out that I am a Conde Nast editor. I am exactly the gatekeeper that I talk about. I decide what gets in the pages in my magazine. It's hard to do it. We're very discriminating. We try to guess at what's going to be popular. It's hard to get in the door, but once you're in the door you have extraordinary marketing power behind you.

I get that model. That model has fantastic benefits, but it's not the only model. I'm also a blogger and increasingly, as the years migrate, we're going to open our (editorial) doors to voices that weren't identified through the old model. Some of them were self-identified by being commentators or bloggers or participants in our site, and some of them will turn out to have important voices that wouldn't otherwise be heard.

Q: Let's talk about the economics of the long tail. Chris, you mentioned a band called the Arctic Monkeys. They've experienced some success, and they very well might become hugely popular. But do they have any hope of making the money the Rolling Stones and the Beatles did? And do any of your magazine's prospective new contributors, those culled from the blogosphere, are they going to make any money?

Anderson: The simple answer is that some will, most won't. One of the points I make, and I think it's an important point in this era of pure production, if you'll forgive the jargon, is that money is not the only measure of quality. Most bloggers do it for free. Most bands don't quit their day jobs. Most of the people who are uploading videos are doing it for free. There are other incentives that can encourage people to make things beyond money. You have reputation. You have expression. You have fun. In my 20s, I played music and sports for the reasons that most people do: because it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Q: But did you have dreams?

Anderson: It was crazy to have dreams. I wanted to play basketball, but I didn't have any dreams about becoming a pro basketball player because it was crazy. I also played music. Of course, I had no expectations of commercial success, partially because I knew I wasn't any good and partially because the odds are clearly stacked and always have been stacked against commercial success.

That didn't stop me. It doesn't stop people today. I don't feel like a failure or I don't feel cheated because I didn't get any more than beer money out of my music. I had a fantastic time and possibly some of the listeners did, too, although I wouldn't bet on it.

Q: If you take the economic incentive away from writers or musicians, what effect will that have on content and society?

Keen: Look at you guys. We're sitting here in a newspaper office and the newspaper business is in profound crisis. One of the major reasons is because of free content put out by bloggers. The same I think is true of music, where you've had this dramatic decline in sales. This revolution has actually commoditized culture to such an extent that everything becomes free.

In this world of amateur bands and amateur moviemakers on YouTube and amateur bloggers, I think that the consumer, if there is indeed a consumer left, is taking it for granted that everything should be free so that they won't pay for their newspaper, they won't pay for their TV, they won't pay to go to the movies.

I know that Chris is very strong on the economic front, but there has to be a correlation between this explosion of free content on the Internet and the decline in the traditional culture business.

Anderson: People misunderstand free. Most media is, in fact, already free. Television is free to air. Radio is free to air. Newspapers are basically free. What newspapers sell is advertising.

The nominal price we charge for products, which by the way you are losing money on, is simply to qualify the reader or someone who is inclined to read the advertising. So, we're essentially already in a world of free content.

Andrew suggests that music revenues are declining and actually that is not true. CD sales are in decline, but if you include digital singles sales including ring tones and then include ticket sales for live shows, the music business has been relatively flat and actually rising of late.

You have to see it in a much broader perspective of the business. Selling the product is only one way to make money. Selling around the product is a much better way to make money.

Keen: Other than a normal business model, how would you feel if advertisements were sold in your book?

Anderson: Online, fine. If it doesn't interrupt the flow, I have no problem with it.

Keen: I think one of the most pertinent things about what I consider to be a cultural golden age in the 20th century of mass media was that advertising was not packaged in movies. It was not packaged in music and only marginally packaged in newspapers.

I think what's happening is that increasingly you have this collapse of advertising in culture so that you have more and more product placement in movies. You have more sophisticated ways of tying brands into music so that ultimately, you're right. Obviously, there will be a music business. There will be a culture business, but advertising will be so central to it, that the value of culture is going to be profoundly undermined.

When you buy a piece of music, which in some sense is being paid for by Wal-Mart or McDonald's, then I think its core value is much less than if you buy a disc which simply contains music. I see with digital downloads this becoming an increasingly central part of the business model, because if you can't sell the thing, you have to figure out a way that advertising sells it.

Anderson: What does that mean? Buy music being paid for by Wal-Mart? What does that actually mean?

Keen: It means, for example, on YouTube there seems to be more and more sophisticated ways of building brand placement into cultural sales of one sort or another.

Anderson: Give me an example. I don't follow you.

Q: Smirnoff's "TeaPartay" ads on YouTube would be a good example. They're watched for comic value, but advertising is implicit.

Anderson: Do you have an objection to people watching Smirnoff ads on YouTube?

Keen: I don't have an objection to any of those things. What I would like to defend is cultural sales independent of advertising, which I think that the digital revolution is undermining.

Anderson: Are you against advertising?

Keen: I'm not against advertising. I'm against the collapse of advertising in context.

Anderson: Let's talk about the last 20 years. Your concern is that advertising is more pervasive in our culture in the last 20 years, something, by the way, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with.

Keen: Again, I'm not against clear advertising. What I'm against is content, whether it's music or movies, being sold as movies or music but really being financed somehow by a business looking to advertise.

Q: Maybe we can expand this conversation to consider the ideas of democratization, community and sharing -- all central tenets of Web 2.0. To do so, let's try some word association. When I say Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, what do you two think?

Anderson: I think it is an inspirational and remarkable phenomenon. It is perhaps the most powerful phenomenon of our time. It's wildly imperfect and also, in many ways, beautiful.

I think it's the best encyclopedia world in the world collectively. On the individual level, some of the entries are wrong, some of them are freakishly distorted. It suggests a different usage pattern of the encyclopedia. The old model of encyclopedia was the be-all and end-all of information. The new model of encyclopedia is a starting point for investigation.

Must it be approached with caution and a certain amount of skepticism? Absolutely. Is any single entry guaranteed to be right? No. Collectively, it's the best single place to start an investigation or a search for knowledge. I think it's the best in the world.

Keen: I wouldn't call it an encyclopedia. I think it's a dictionary. I think it's a hyper-democratic dictionary. My biggest concern is not so much mistakes, as Chris was saying, but its size. It's a very bloated, disorganized thing. It seems to me that many of the entries have no real ability to distinguish things which are important from things that aren't.

Q: Is it a lack of editing?

Keen: It depends upon how you define editing. There are just too many people who contribute. It's rather like talking to a technology enthusiast. They just go on and on and on. Sometimes, important entries say nothing at all about world historical figures, whereas you have these very long entries on things, it seems to me, that are not very important.

Q: Maybe now I can ask both of you to define what Web 2.0 means. What does that phrase mean to you?

Anderson: I don't think anybody can agree on a definition, and I tend not to use the term. Not that there isn't something going on. I just find the term too indistinct to use. I talk about peer production, otherwise known as user creation.

The funny thing is there is nothing going on here that we weren't talking about 10 years ago. It's just that it now works. It's all much easier to use. We had Web pages in the '90s, but blogs are much easier.

If Web 2.0 is anything, it's sort of the functional delivery of what we were talking about during Web 1.0. But it's fundamentally about individual empowerment -- letting regular people participate in what was previously the domain of the few.

Keen: Well, again it's this idea of regular people that I'm uncomfortable with. It opens everything up and everyone becomes a mini-Gutenberg. That, in itself, isn't a bad thing. But there is the issue of consequences, cultural and economic. Who wins and who loses? Again, I think that the problem is the way in which these things can be abused.

Q: Another core tenet of Web 2.0 has been "citizen journalism." Can the mainstream media be replaced, or supported, by citizen reporters gathering and disseminating information for free?

Anderson: I'm not sure I know what the word journalism means anymore. Let me give you an example.

My interaction with Microsoft has changed in recent years. I used to read the speeches and see the press releases from Bill (Gates) and Steve (Ballmer) and absorb the top-down messaging from the company. Now, as a consumer, I'm more likely to read the individual blogs of the engineers involved with various products I'm interested in.

I use Windows media center, and there is no level of detail about that product that I'm not interested in. I have a fantastic amount of interest in that, but virtually no interest in some of Microsoft's other products.

Those people, in sort of describing the product development, are doing what used to be the domain of the trade press. Clearly, they are not journalists. They're talking about themselves. In many ways, they are providing an information function that journalism used to do on its own.

Another example: My interest is very intense around my family, my community and my friends. And that sort of diminishes as you move outward. Obviously, traditional journalistic institutions don't scale down to the level of my kid's soccer game. And yet, there is a reporting function that still needs to be done. Is that journalism? I don't know what it is, but I do know that, increasingly, individuals are going to be doing it.

Then you scale all the way out to Iraq, and that's a situation where I'm very much in favor of working with professionals with experience, resources and special access to deliver the news.

Q: At what point does objectivity matter? You were talking about that level of scale. Do you really need an objective reporter at your kid's soccer game? Maybe not, but as you get closer to the PTA, I would imagine you definitely do.

Anderson: I take a somewhat unpopular view. I think the notion of objectivity has never really been attainable. I think it's an outgrowth of that era where there was one or two newspapers in any town and that was the only way a reader could get the information. There was an obligation to be evenhanded.

Increasingly, we have sort of an infinite number of places you can get information. There is less requirement at any one of them to have all sides of the story and be perfectly balanced. Let's face it: No media could ever be objective, and we have biases whether they're explicit or implicit.

In many other countries, you've done away with that notion. In the U.K., you have the left-wing press and the right. They're transparent about where they come from, and if you want two sides of the story, you read two newspapers. Increasingly, in an era of infinite sources, you see the importance of a strongly argued perspective. There is less and less expectation that any one place is going to be dispassionate and perfectly balanced.

Keen: I agree that there is no such thing as objective journalism, whatever that is. I think that Chris' point can actually be used to justify the professional media which we pay for.

I don't think it's any coincidence that on the New York Times Web site they give their news away for free, but you pay for (columnist) Maureen Dowd, you pay for Thomas Friedman, because those are the guys who have a voice. Those are the people who have many years of training as reporters and as columnists.

I think the acquisition of voice is perhaps the most difficult of all things. I agree that newspapers should be more opinionated. I come from the U.K. -- from that tradition. What concerns me is distinguishing between rants, which one finds on so many blogs, and quality opinion.

One of my heroes is Christopher Hitchens, the angry English columnist. No one would ever accuse him of being objective. To maintain that tradition of a Hitchens or a Friedman, I think people still need to buy newspapers, pay their columnists large amounts of money and be able to distinguish that kind of professional wise opinion.

Q: Is there too much noise in the world? Andrew, in a way, you are saying, "I want a handful of people who know what they are talking about to tell me what's going on in the world." Chris is saying, "I'm willing to filter a million voices myself and I'll find out what's important that way." Is that what we're talking about here?

Anderson: Fantastic. When you say I can filter a million voices myself, I am filtering a million voices, but not doing it myself. What I have is layers of filters. There are people out there who have more time than me, have more expertise than me or just find things that I haven't found. I have maybe 200 voices out there that I listen to, but collectively I'm filtering a million voices through all those layers. As a result, I get a richer, higher-quality diet of information better suited to me to pull from a wider pool and wider variety of sources. It's not that much trouble. It's much easier than it's ever been before.

Keen: Again, the thing that concerns me is we seem to be going on this very, very long, complicated journey to get back to where we started. Let me ask you this question: What do you know now that you wouldn't be able to know 15 or 20 years ago?

Anderson: I'm a little confused by the question.

Keen: These layers you are talking about -- give me a concrete example of what you can know through them that traditional mainstream media doesn't enable you to know, which you think is valuable.

Anderson: The Microsoft example I gave was one. The traditional media was not going to give me that level of resolution about my very narrow interest. Traditional media was not going to get scaled down to that level of interest because it's too small to be a commercial proposition. But, that's my interest. I have some very broad interests and I have some very narrow interests.

Q: I wanted to wrap things up by asking where are we going to be in 10 years and where is this movement taking us?

Anderson: I think that the genie is out of the bottle and is going to stay out of the bottle, that people given a voice won't give it up. The tools of the spoken text and video and music and democracy are only going to get more powerful and we're going to have more freedom to do so, and I suspect that more people will find a voice. That's a trend that's not going to stop.

How it changes our culture overall as we become less and less of a cultural lockstep of shared culture and more and more of a tribal culture where we have our niche interests? I think the jury is out as to what that's going to do to us.

Keen: I think we are seeing more fragmentation. I think we are seeing more anger. I think we are seeing this radicalization of culture and life. I think that technology seems to be almost coincidental and has exploded around this at the same time that Americans are very angry about many different things.

It has nothing to do with blogs or technology, but all these things are coming together in a way that concerns me and I think that if our traditional institutions of politics or culture or economics continue to be undermined by this personalization and radical individualization of things, then I think we will be in trouble.

I think that if the Internet becomes more and more of a soapbox to trash elected politicians and mainstream media figures and to conduct these witch hunts on anyone who ever makes a mistake, then I think that eventually we are going to find ourselves in a world where we're just going to be staring at a mirror.

It's going to result in what I call cultural and economic anarchy, and I don't think that is a good thing. I think it will result in less community, which is ironic given the fact that this thing is supposed to be about community.

Andrew Keen

Age: 46

Birthplace: London

Occupation: Media entrepreneur; author, "The Cult of the Amateur," to be published in May

Education: Bachelor's degree in history, London University; master's in political science, UC Berkeley

Family: Wife and two children

Chris Anderson

Age: 45

Birthplace: London

Occupation: Editor in chief, Wired magazine; author, "The Long Tail"

Education: Bachelor's degree in physics, George Washington University

Family: Wife and four children

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